never again

Today I attended the commemoration of Holocaust victims at the Pinkas synagogue in Prague, the walls of which have the names of Czech Jews who died in concentration camps, inscribed. Many of them were my relatives.

The event took place on the day Kristallnacht happened seventy years ago. Most of the people who attended were the generation of my grandparents and my parents. Almost no one younger than my parents was there.

I cannot begin to describe the emotions I felt, being there with my father whose parents survived concentration camps, and his cousin who herself is a survivor. I held myself back, because when I really think about it, the emotions that well up are just too strong for a quiet and solemn gathering such as today's was.

And what scares me about the Holocaust is that the vast majority of the "unaffected" people just stood by while the targeted groups were rounded up and virutally decimated: Jews (my dad's family), communists (my mom's father), gays, and the Roma. And others didn't just stand by. More than enough Czechs willingly collaborated with the Nazis, and so many had no qualms about taking what wasn't theirs.

And what really hits home is that the Holocaust wasn't that long ago, or somewhere in a faraway land, but here on this soil and the soil of Germany and Poland. It is a true miracle that my grandparents survived, that I am here and that Jonah can now walk on the same soil, in the same streets where my family lived peacefully, with great hopes for the future prior to the 1930's.